Failure Elongation of Steel Sheets for an Autobody at the High Strain Rate

This paper presents the dynamic failure elongation of conventional mild steels and advanced high strength steel sheets such as TRIP and DP steels. The failure elongation has been obtained from the high speed tensile testing machine with various strain rates ranged from 0.003/s to 200/s. The experimental result demonstrates that the tensile elongation does not simply decrease as the strain rate increases, but it decreases from the quasi-static state to the strain rate of 0.1 or 1/s and increases again up to the strain rate of 100/s. Furthermore, some high strength steels have the tendency that the tensile elongation increases as the strain rate increases. This tendency has varieties depending on the microstructure and forming history of sheet metal. Moreover, the localized strain rate hardening in the necking region induces the increase of elongation. This phenomenon is very important not only in sheet metal forming but also in the crashworthiness evaluation to predict the fracture of sheet metal members.